e doctor and Sir
Everard kept watch in an adjoining chamber, within sight of that
girlish form.

Once, in the small hours, the sick man looked at her clearly, and spoke
aloud:

"Wake me at day-dawn, Harrie."

"Yes, papa."

And then he slept again. The slow hours dragged away--morning was
near. She walked to the window, drew the curtain and looked out.
Dimly the pearly light was creeping over the sky, lighting the purple,
sleeping sea, brightening and brightening with every passing second.

She would not disobey him. She left the window and bent over the bed.
How still he lay!

"Papa," she said, kissing him softly, "day is dawning."

But the captain never moved nor spoke. And then Harriet Hunsden knew
the everlasting day had dawned for him.

CHAPTER XV.

THE DEAD MAN'S SECRET.

It was a very stately ceremonial that which passed through the gates of
Hunsden Hall, to lay Harold Godfrey Hunsden's ashes with those of many
scores of Hunsdens who had gone before.

The heir at law---an impoverished London swell--was there in sables and
sweeping hat-band, exulting inwardly that the old chap had gone at last,
and "the king had got his own again."

Sir Everard Kingsland was there, conspicuous and interesting in his new
capacity of betrothed to the dead man's daughter.

And the dead man's daughter herself, in trailing crape and sables,
deathly pale and still, was likewise there, cold and rigid almost as the
corpse itself.

For she had never shed a tear since that awful moment when, with a wild,
wailing cry of orphanage, she had flung herself down on the dead breast
as the new day dawned.

The day of the funeral was one of ghostly gloom. The November wind
swept icily over the sea with a dreary wail of winter; the cold rain
beat its melancholy drip, drip; sky and earth and sea were all blurred
in a clammy mist.

White and wild, Harriet Hunsden hung on her lover's arm while the
Reverend Cyrus Green solemnly read the touching burial service, and
Harold Hunsden was laid to sleep the everlasting sleep.

And then she was going back to the desolate old home--oh, so horribly
desolate now! She looked at his empty chamber, at his vacant chair, at
his forsaken bed. Her face worked; with a long, anguished cry she flung
herself on her lover's breast and wept the rushing, passionate tears of
seventeen that keep youthful hearts from breaking.

He held her there as reverently, as tenderly as that dead father mi